Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Astonishing report in today's Stabroek News about a human cloning experiment conducted in Guyana in the early 1970s, which finally explains "the largest mystery of the Jagdeo presidency".

Luncheon ... started work at a small laboratory at Unity, Mahaica in the early 1970s, collecting the embryos from several healthy mothers. His cloning process was admittedly crude and involved using a pair of tweezers and a coconut pointer. For several months he had no success. But then one night he accidentally braced a live wire while working on a particular petri-dish and a surge of electricity resulted in "a successful duplicatory process" to the point of creating 12 separate but exactly similar embryos.

They were quickly inserted into the wombs of twelve cows at a special division of the National Agricultural Research Institute under the supervision of a young Dr Odo Homezero. Nine months later the babies were successfully birthed with Professor Dr Luncheon in attendance.

He kept the project top secret not even informing the PPP central committee, and for the next 18 years he personally wet nursed the 12 infants with the milk of Marxist concepts.

At that point the genius of what until then had been a purely scientific experiment became apparent. Not only was this a project to clone the first human, Professor Dr Luncheon wanted to clone the first politician.

Meanwhile, on the heels of this devastating revelation, a report has surfaced that a similar experiment was attempted even earlier in Trinidad, approved by Dr. Williams himself, under the code name Project for the Advancement of Trinidadian Operational Sycophancy. However, it was a near-complete failure, as the twelve P.A.T.O.S clones, though born in possession of the most endearing dimples, were every one of them missing crucial components of the brain required for rational thought. Dr. Williams ordered their destruction in the interests of national security, but unknown to him one P.A.T.O.S. clone survived, and was reared by a shadowy PNM cabal in a cave in Cumuto. It is not known if this clone survived to adulthood, & if so whether he has managed to achieve any sort of public role. Questioned about the P.A.T.O.S. allegations by reporters at a press conference this morning, Prime Minister Patrick Manning appeared to be struck dumb & turned a peculiar shade of purple. He was hurried away from the microphone by his wife Hazel & energy minister-to-be Lenny Saith, who was heard to whisper into the PM's ear, "It's all right, we'll get you safely back to the pod."